Zane Grey

His Life, His Adventures, His Women

Thomas H. Pauly

Publication Year: 2005

Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early development of the film industry, and central to the early popularity of the Western._x000B_Grey's personal life was as colorful as his best novels. Two backcountry trips into the Grand Canyon inspired his first Westerns, and he returned to Arizona annually for many years. His matching passion for sport fishing carried him to Mexico, Nova Scotia, the Galapagos Islands, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Australia. These trips were a canvas for the striking contradictions in Grey's life. Though he celebrated chastity and romantic love in his novels and his marriage was crucial to his success, these ideals were sorely tested by his long separations, deep depressions, and multiple involvements with women. Likewise his popularization of hunting, fishing, and the latest equipment threatened the wilderness that he revered and campaigned to protect._x000B_Thomas H. Pauly's work is the first full-length biography of Zane Grey to appear in over thirty years. Using a hitherto unknown trove of letters and journals, including never-before-seen photographs of his adventures--both natural and amorous--Zane Grey will greatly enlarge and radically alter the current understanding of the superstar author, whose fifty-seven novels and one hundred and thirty movies heavily influenced the world's perception of the Old West._x000B_

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

One of the best parts of this project was all the kind, interesting people who
aided my search for information. Early on, while I was deliberating whether
to write this biography, I decided that I needed to meet with Loren Grey,
Zane’s son and the current head of Zane Grey, Inc., and find out what he
thought about this possibility. ...

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Given the remarkable success of her husband’s career, the defensiveness
in Dolly’s comment about her husband’s “genius” is surprising. Grey was the best-selling author in America during the 1920s and a major contributor
to the Western genre’s rise in popularity. ...

1. Wayward Youth: 1872-90

Pearl Zane Gray’s pioneer heritage was imprinted on his consciousness with
the name his parents gave him at his birth on January 31, 1872. Anecdotal
histories report his given name of Pearl as derived from the mourning attire
of Queen Victoria that newspapers regularly described as “pearl gray.” ...

2. Quest for Direction: 1890-1905

By the precocious age of fifteen, Pearl was already “very expert in extracting
teeth” (5, 8). Rural Ohio was so sufficiently free of regulation that he was able
to practice dentistry even before his relocation to Columbus. In Zanesville,
Lewis employed cocaine, but this sedative still necessitated a deft removal
of the tooth to prevent pain. ...

3. Adventurous Apprentice: 1906-10

In one of the few reviews of The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), Forest and Stream
offered the following information about the work’s little-known author: “Dr.
Grey hails from Pike county, Pennsylvania. A couple of years ago he had in
contemplation a trip to South America; a cruise in a small boat around the
Peninsula of Labrador to Hudson Bay; ...

4. Pursuit of the Dream: 1911-14

In March 1911, four months after the publication of The Heritage of the Desert,
Field and Stream presented the first installment of “Down an Unknown
Jungle River.” For this issue, the editors prepared a special, bright-red cover
with a huge Z slashing from top to bottom of the page, like the famous mark
of Zorro. ...

5. Moviemaking and Button Fish: 1915-19

During the spring of 1914, Grey sent Robert Davis an undated postcard on
which he wrote, “You will be pleased to learn that the book you inspired me
to write has been for a month the best selling book in the United States.”
He did not identify the novel, but his card was a piece of promotion for The
Light of Western Stars, ...

6. Calamity: 1920-23

By 1920, the forty-seven-year-old and still youthful Zane Grey was on top and
in charge, and he had no inkling of disaster on the horizon. After struggling
with rejection and disappointment for the first ten years of his writing career,
and then capitalizing on his hard-won advances during the years spanned by
World War I, ...

7. Movin' On: 1924-25

Had Zane been able to foresee the future, he would have done nothing and
given thanks that his problems passed so quickly. Of course, he could not,
and in deciding to take action, he prolonged the healing process. Prior to
his departure for New York City, he mailed the Catalina Islander an article
entitled “Heavy Tackle for Heavy Fish,” ...

8. Fresh Starts and Farewells: 1925-30

In its February 21, 1925, issue, Publishers Weekly ran an article about the one
hundred best-selling authors from 1900 through 1924 and ranked Zane Grey
number six. The five authors above him—Winston Churchill, Harold Bell
Wright, Booth Tarkington, George Barr McCutcheon, and Mary Roberts
Rinehart— started writing best sellers before 1910.1 ...

9. Undone: 1930-39

Common understanding of Depression history holds that it began on October
24, 1929, when the stock market “crashed.” On that day the Dow Jones
Average gave up thirty-four points, or 9 percent, on trading volume that was
three times normal. The selling actually started in September when the market
hit a record high of 386. ...

Postscript

Zane Grey died during a resurgence of interest in the Western. Over the years
of the Depression, the genre was kept alive by an outpouring of B-films for
“double features” that the major studios offered, along with free china, to
lure penny-pinching audiences to theaters. Nearly half of all the film adaptations
of Grey novels were B-films from the decade of the Depression. ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.